(piano music)
- [Woman] So we are going to talk
about Rembrandt's self-portraits.
It's really only with Rembrandt that you can say
we're going to talk about the artist's self-portraits,
I mean, he's the first artist
that you can really do that with.
- [Man] Certainly since portraiture had emerged
as an independent genre of painting in the 1400s,
other artists had made self-portraits.
For most other artists, it was occasional thing.
- [Woman] Right, like Raphael
put himself in The School of Athens.
- [Man] Right, or even sometimes independent self-portraits,
but none with the incredible regularity that Rembrandt did.
There's something like over 60 of them
and usually more than one a year.
- [Woman] Yeah, so he's really sort of taking it
as a kind of project for himself.
- [Man] And it actually makes a lot of sense
if we think about what we know about Rembrandt
and the development of his professional identity,
because he was very self-conscious
about performing identity, Rembrandt the painter.
And so he develops this characteristic Rembrandt style
that it makes sense in his great interest in his identity
that he would also make a lot of self-portraits as well.
- [Woman] Yeah, and he to also sort of deal
with the market in Holland and he's making a name
for himself as a portrait painter.
So he's spending a lot of time thinking about
what it means to make a portrait and a likeness,
and how to go beyond the sort of normal portrait tradition
and do more with painting a face and a likeness.
So this is a really early--
- [Man] This is an early one from 1629,
he's only about 23 years old,
and already we can see his hallmark characteristic features,
not only in painting in general
but also in his approach to portraiture.
For instance, the great tenebrism,
the bright light that shines directly on the face
where the rest of the painting
seems to dissolve into loose shadows.
- [Woman] Right, and which seems like
a very Baroque characteristic to me,
that kind of very stark contrast of light and dark,
- And you can see-- - And you can be
very dramatic about the lighting.
- [Man] Very much an influence of Caravaggio
in the north, here.
- [Woman] And there's also a kind of immmediacy to it
that I think of as very Baroque.
In other words, he looks like he's really right there,
he's alive, he's maybe just about
to talk to us and greet us.
- [Man] Yeah, and even in this early painting,
this early portrait, we can see what's typical
of most of Rembrandt's portraits,
even though there's a kind of economy of paint
and he's not using a lot of tiny details,
he still communicates the identity
and the personality of the sitter, here himself,
in a very engaging way where he really
seems to leap out at you.
- Very lifelike. - Very, very lifelike.
And again, also in terms of general characteristics
there is a rather painterly application of the paint,
although at this very, very early stage in his career
it's not as exaggerated as it'll be,
- As it's gonna become. - Very shortly, that's right.
- [Woman] Let's look at the next one.
- [Man] Here's another one from a little bit later.
- [Woman] This is from 1640 and Rembrandt's 34.
I like this portrait because it always looks to me
like a very middle-aged kind of portrait to me.
- [Man] Yeah.
- [Woman] You know, it looks to me like he's established
himself as a portrait painter in Amsterdam,
he's successful, he's got students, he's making money,
he's got commissions, he's amassing an art collection,
he's buying a house, he's taking a wife,
he's doing the things that one does
as one gets into one's thirties.
It also looks to me like he went out with all his money
and bought himself some really nice clothes.
- [Man] Well, we know that he loved dressing people up,
and so whether--
- [Woman] I think he liked dressing himself up.
- [Man] Himself or other people
that come to his portrait studio,
the idea of getting dressed up and posing for a portrait
is something that appeals to him,
even in terms of the act of posing itself.
And something else to recognize here in terms of,
you're saying that he's showing himself
being successful as an artist,
is the way that this pose and even the outfit
to a certain extent recalls Renaissance self-portraits.
- Absolutely. - Like people by Titian,
paintings by Titian, rather. - This is very much
like Titian. - Or Raphael,
he's inserting himself into a great line
of major artists from the past.
- [Woman] Yeah, and I think that even though
there's a sense of confidence that comes
from his pose and the luxury of the clothing
that he's wearing, if you look at his face and his eyes,
there's something kind of vulnerable,
something very self-aware there about capturing himself
as he moves through time, from his youth
toward his middle age, toward his old age.
There's a sense of poignancy there that I think
that's always there with Rembrandt's portraits.
- [Man] That's right.
So let's look at a little later one.
This is a portrait from 1658, Rembrandt is 52 years old.
This painting is at Frick Museum in New York City.
And again, we can talk about the same kinds of things,
it shows him with this great attention to light and shadow
and how the light, falling mostly on the face and the hands,
brings the figure out of the dark background
with the use of tenebrism.
- [Woman] But the figure's sort of coming apart
a little now because the paint is much more loosely applied.
- [Man] You can see already that his approach has
a much looser, rougher application of paint.
And this painting is interesting
for a couple of other reasons too.
This painting is pretty unique among his self-portraits,
and all self-portraits.
- [Woman] Yeah, he's frontal, in fact--
- [Man] He's completely frontal.
- [Woman] We hardly ever see that pose in any portraits.
- [Man] Exactly.
Usually most people in portraits are represented,
even if their face is looking frontally,
their body is turned in three-quarter pose.
- [Woman] Yeah, their shoulders are three quarters.
- [Man] The only people who are ever represented
completely frontally, usually, are kings and dukes,
other people at the very top of the hierarchy.
Combined with the robe that he's wearing,
and the chair that he's sitting in,
and the stick that he's holding in his hand.
- [Woman] Right, which sort of feels almost like,
reads almost like a scepter, like a king would hold.
- [Man] Exactly, it's clear that Rembrandt,
it's not just an accident that he looks like a king,
he's presenting himself here as a king,
dressed up in some of the outfits that he kept in his studio
in this chair and holding what looks like a scepter,
he is the king, but he's specifically, I think,
the king of painting,
because that scepter that he's holding is not
- [Both] A scepter at all!
- [Man] Think about what a king would actually hold,
it wouldn't be like a little stick like that.
So, Rembrandt here is the king of painting,
because the stick that he's holding
is not what a king would actually hold.
- [Woman] No, it's actually something artists use, right?
- [Man] It's a tool that artists use
when standing at the easel and painting.
It's a stick that they hold in usually the left hand
and then they rest their right hand on it
so that their arm doesn't get tired as it's up in the air.
- [Woman] Right, they sort of lean it against the canvas,
right? - Right, exactly.
- [Woman] And so they have something steady to--
- [Man] Something steady to rest
their arm on while they're painting.
And so that stick that he's holding, it's a scepter,
but it's a painting tool, and that really helps us
understand him as, specifically, the king of painting.
- [Woman] And also if you look at
how that hand is represented.
- Exactly. - It's so much about paint,
I mean, it almost barely looks like hand.
- [Man] It doesn't even really look like flesh,
and you can say that a little bit about his face,
but especially that hand, it seems to be--
- [Woman] Especially compared to the other one.
- [Man] It seems to be flesh dissolving into paint,
and like you said, if we compare it to the other hand,
the difference is very noticeable.
Now, there's a couple of reasons
why it might be painted so differently from the other hand.
We have to remember that this is a self-portrait,
not a portrait, and so normally,
if it were a portrait of someone else,
the hand there that's holding that stick
would be that person's left hand,
because they would be turned and facing you.
But since it's a self-portrait,
remember that Rembrandt is looking into a mirror,
and so that is actually his right hand.
- [Woman] That's actually the hand
that he's in the act of painting with.
- [Man] That's the hand that he paints with.
- [Woman] But has to portray it as not painting.
- [Man] Exactly, so that's one reason why it might be
more blurry and more loosely painted than the other hand.
But you can also get more theoretical,
because that right hand, as the painting hand,
is the hand associated most with the medium,
with the art of making painting,
and so perhaps the painterly quality,
that idea, as I said, of flesh becoming paint here,
is almost symbolic in a way,
that Rembrandt is so engaged with painting,
as the king of painting, after so many years
as a successful painter, that it's as if he himself
is turning into paint.
- [Woman] Yeah, imagine a career of painting for, what,
40 or 50 years of painting just about every day
and in a way being much more engaged in the making of paint
than any artist today would be.
It is true that toward the end of his life,
Rembrandt has an amazing facility with it,
so that he can brush it on in the loosest way
and it really so quickly represents
what he wants it to represent.
I mean, it's really an amazing thing.
- [Man] It is an amazing thing, and I think the way that
that hand stands out as so painterly, literally being paint,
I think really drives that message home.
And, you know, he's in his fifties,
he's about 52 when he paints this, he's starting slowly
to get towards the mature ages of his life,
and his later years.
- [Woman] In fact, most people didn't even live this long.
- [Man] Exactly, he's pretty old for the time,
and so it's interesting to see how he gets even older,
how this transition from flesh into paint
becomes even more dramatic and maybe the starkest example
is this very, very late
self-portrait. - This is so weird.
- [Man] This is from 1669--
- [Woman] This is actually the year that he dies
- [Man] The year that he dies,
and here you can see, literally,
I mean, it's as if there is no more flesh,
he has become all paint,
his face is dissolving into pigment,
into the paint, as if it's squeezed directly
(laughs) out of the tube, as we would do it.
And that the physical person has been subsumed
into painting completely.
- [Woman] It's almost like he's a ghost or a specter,
in a way, made out of paint. - Exactly,
because he's been so overcome
by the material of his profession.
One way to think of this also is that maybe
it's a reference to classical antiquity,
in a story from the antique,
that the painter Zeuxis
was in his old age
painting a portrait of a very old woman
and laughing, and that was actually how he died.
(woman laughs)
And so maybe this very late painting
that Rembrandt is making of himself laughing like this
is a reference to that greatest of painters
from classical antiquity.
(piano music)